An Outpost on the edge of music

Thursday

Jun 26, 2008 at 12:01 AMJun 26, 2008 at 4:35 PM

No matter what you think of the small space at 186 1/2 Hampshire Street, no matter how you describe it, longtime Cambridge resident Rob Chalfen, who runs Outpost 186, prefers that you don’t use the term “club.”

Ed Symkus

No matter what you think of the small space at 186 1/2 Hampshire Street, no matter how you describe it, longtime Cambridge resident Rob Chalfen, who runs Outpost 186, prefers that you don’t use the term “club.”

“I think gallery is the operative term,” says Chalfen, who’s been involved with performing arts spaces as well as alternative art forms including underground press, pirate radio, art galleries, and free jazz since the mid-1980s.

“We call Outpost 186 a workshop space, with people trying out new concepts,” he says. “It’s noncommercial-type music and performance and poetry.”

And it’s a gallery. The 25-seat space, which rose, phoenix-like, out of the ashes of the late, lamented Zeitgeist Gallery — where Chalfen used to book shows under the aegis of the Subconscious Café — shares a building with a yoga studio, a psychiatric consortium, and the brain tumor survivors’ organization T.H.E. Brain Trust. So far, the art on Outpost 186’s walls is from friends of Chalfen, “whose work I like.”

The gallery-performance spot came to be after a long presenting affiliation between Chalfen and his “partner-in-crime” Al Nidle, both of whom did all kinds of shows at the Naked Eye Gallery, the first and second Piano Dave Galleries and, later, at all three Zeitgeist Gallery locations.

After Zeitgeist closed for good in 2006, Chalfen and Nidle moved operations to the current address, sharing it with Axiom Gallery for a while. Some renovations were begun, then Nidle headed off to greener pastures, and Chalfen took over — completing the renovation last summer, and opening in the fall.

Aside from the eclectic acts that regularly appear at Outpost 186 (currently the veteran band Birdsongs of the Mesozoic is in residency to brush up on their improvisation skills), Chalfen is using the room to continue presenting his long-running Subconscious Café series.

“That’s just the name I put on things I’ve produced personally,” he says. “It started out at the Zeitgeist in 1996 with Sebastian Lockwood, who lived in Cambridge for many years. He was doing improvising on ‘The Odyssey of Homer,’ as a storyteller. Then I started bringing in other musicians and other accompanists, and it became a sort of jazz scene. It was initially sort of a repertory ensemble that was working out this concept, then people began approaching me for gigs. So I started improvising, trying on different things for size, and seeing what fit.”

But Chalfen is sharp enough to know that you can’t exactly make a living by producing esoteric acts in a 25-seat room. (Of course, it helps that his day job involves managing properties for his family and, luckily, Outpost 186 is in one of his family’s buildings.) So he also runs it as a rental.

“I’m renting it to producers,’ he says. “I have my series, and that sets the tone, then other people who want to be associated with that — mostly jazz, experimental and cabaret people — are coming in on it. And I’m trying to encourage people to produce their own series. It’s working out just fine.”

Chalfen has been finding that the audience he’s been attracting is as diverse as the entertainment that’s been drawing them.

“We get older people and younger people,” he says. “In many instances it’s friends, families and classmates [of the performers], but there are also a lot of music fans — people who are looking for some different stuff in a serious listening environment.”

First-time audience members are often surprised that no liquor is served at Outpost 186, but Chalfen has no plans to change that.

“It’s a licensing nightmare with the city,” he says. “It creates out-of-control situations which create problems with the cops which create licensing nightmares with the city.”

But he’s got plenty of other plans. Working along with his right hand man Chris Rich, former music booker at Brookline Tai Chi, he mentions his thoughts on his visions of a media-scape.

“I’ve had a history with community radio, and I’m on the board of Citizen Media, which is plotting to do something [in community journalism]. But I’m not planning on doing anything pirate right now. I’d also like to Web cast our lives shows. We want to stream live music out of the place.

“And I’m going to get video projection,” he adds. “One of my plans is to wrap the entire wall with video projection so it becomes an environment; we could hook it up to the Internet and we could commission pieces for it. I have many grandiose schemes.”

Outpost 186 is at 186 1/2 Hampshire St., Cam. Upcoming shows include The Vortex Other Dimension Ensemble on 6/20; Dana Price and friends on 6/21; and a Terry Riley birthday party with Birdsongs of the Mesozoic performing “In C” on 6/24. For more information, visit http://www.zeitgeist-outpost.org/